by Ben Bova
Finally his bearded face broke into a benign smile. “Mr. Gunn, you were right. The Bible describes our situation perfectly. ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters and it shall be returned unto you a thousand fold.’“
“Does that mean we’ve got a deal?” Sam asked flatly.
I pushed over toward him and banged the blank key hard enough to send me recoiling toward the overhead. Sam looked up at me. There was no surprise on his face. He looked as if he had expected me to fight him.
“You can’t do this!” I said. “You’re playing into his hands! You can’t...”
“You want to stay on the asteroid or not?”
I stopped in mid-sentence and stared at him. Sam’s eyes were flat gray, boring into me.
“This is the way business is done, kid,” he said. “You want the asteroid. They want the asteroid. I make a threat they know is phony, but they pretend to consider it—as long as they get something they don’t have now. What it boils down to is, you can stay on the asteroid if Holier-Than-Thou gets to paint his advertisements across the ionosphere. That’s the deal. Will you go for it or riot?”
I couldn’t speak. I was too furious, too confused, torn both ways and angry at Sam for putting me in this agony of indecision. I wanted to stay on the asteroid, yes, but not at the price of allowing the Moralists to deface the sky!
The message light on the screen began blinking. Sam touched the blank key again, and Dabney’s face filled the screen once more, smiling an oily smile, the kind of unctuous happiness that a salesman shows when he’s finally palmed off some shoddy goods at a shameful price.
“We have a deal, Mr. Gunn. We will rethink our options on acquiring that particular asteroid. Your, ah ... friend,” he made a nasty smirk, “can stay and chip away at the rock to her heart’s content. In return, you will help us to produce our ads in the ionosphere.”
Sam glanced at me. I could negate the whole thing with merely a shake of my head. Instead, I nodded. And bit my lip so hard I tasted blood in my mouth.
Sam grinned at the display screen. “We’ve got a deal, Bishop.”
“Reverend,” corrected Dabney. Then he added, “And I presume our cargo of worms will arrive at Eden in a healthy condition?”
“That’s up to you,” said Sam, straight-faced. “And the power of prayer.”
They chatted amiably for a few minutes more, a pair of con men congratulating each other. Each of them had what he wanted. I began to realize that Sam would make a considerable amount of money from producing the Moralists’ ionospheric advertisements. My anger took a new turn. I could feel my face turning red, my cheeks burning with rage.
Sam finally ended his conversation with Rev. Dabney and turned off the comm console. It seemed to me that Dabney’s bearded image remained on the screen even after it went dark and dead. It burned in my vision like the afterimage of an explosion.
Sam turned to me with a wide grin splitting his face. “Congratulations! You can stay on the asteroid.”
“Congratulations yourself,” I said, my voice trembling, barely under control. “You have put yourself into the advertising business. You should make a great deal of profit out of defacing the sky. I hope that makes you happy.”
I stormed out of the bridge and headed for the locker where I had left my space suit. Yes, I could stay on my asteroid and finish my work. But my love affair with Sam Gunn was shattered completely.
He let the fat engineer fly me back to my quarters. Sam knew I was furious and it would be best for him to leave me alone.
But not for long. After four or five sleepless hours, bobbing around my darkened quarters like a cork tossed on a stormy sea, I saw the message light of my comm console flick bright red. I reached out and turned it on.
Sam’s face appeared on the screen, a half-guilty boyish grin on his face. “Still mad at me?”
“No, not really.” And I realized it was true even as I spoke the words. I was angry at Dabney and his smug Moralist power; angry at myself, mostly, for wanting to carve The Rememberer so much that I was willing to let them do whatever they wanted, so long as they left me alone.
“Good,” said Sam. “Want me to bring some breakfast over to you?”
I shook my head. “I think not.”
“Got to make a course change in another couple hours,” he said. “So I can bring this can of worms to Eden.”
“I know.” He would be leaving me, and I could not blame him if he never returned. Still, it was impossible for me to allow him to come close to me. Not now. Not this soon after the deal he had struck. I knew he had done it for me, although I also knew he had his own reasons, as well.
“Listen—I can get somebody else do design the pictures for the Moralists. You don’t have to do it.”
He was trying to be kind to me, I knew. But my anger did not abate. “Who draws the pictures doesn’t matter, Sam. It’s the fact that the advertisements will be spread across the sky. For them. That disgusts me.”
“I’m doing this for you, kid.”
“And for the profits,” I snapped. “Tell the whole truth.”
“Yep, there’s a pot full of money in it,” Sam admitted. “You wouldn’t have to depend on your university grant anymore.”
“Never!” I spat.
He grinned at me. “That’s my girl. I would’ve been disappointed if you agreed to it. But I had to ask, had to give you the first shot at the money.”
Money. Art and money are always bound together, no matter what you do. The artist must eat. Must breathe. And that requires money.
But I stubbornly refused to give in to the temptation. I would not help that slithering Dabney to spread his advertising filth across the world’s sky. Never.
Or so I thought.
THINGS HAPPENED SO fast over the next few weeks that, to this day, I am not entirely certain how the chain of events began. Who did what to whom. I am only certain of one thing: Dabney had no intention of carrying out his part of the bargain he had struck with Sam, and he never did.
I was alone again, and missing Sam terribly. For three years I had lived in isolation without a tear or a regret. I had even relished the solitude, the freedom from the need to adjust my behavior to the expectations of others. Sam had burst into my life like a joyful energetic skyrocket, showering pretty sparks everywhere. And now that he was gone, I missed him. I feared I would never see him again, and I knew if he forgot me it would be my own fault.
Suddenly my sorrowing loneliness was shattered by the arrival of a team of two dozen propulsion engineers, with legal documents that stated they were empowered to move my asteroid to Eden, where it was to be broken up and used as structural material for the Moralists’ habitat.
Without thinking twice I put in a frantic call for Sam. It turned out he was halfway around the Earth’s orbit. He had delivered his worms to Eden and was now on his way back to the Moon to pick up electronics components for a new construction site at the L-4 libration point.
There were no relay stations around Earth’s orbit in those days. My call had to fight past the Sun’s coronal interference. Sam’s image, when he came onto my comm screen, was shimmering and flecked with pinpoint bursts of light, like an old hologram.
As soon as he said hello I unloaded my tale of woe in a single burst of unrelieved fury and fear.
“They’re taking possession of the asteroid!” I finished. “I told you they couldn’t be trusted!”
For once in his life Sam was silent and thoughtful. I watched his expression change from mild curiosity to shocked surprise and then to a jaw-clenched anger as my words reached him.
At last he said, “Don’t go off the deep end. Give me a few hours to look into this. I’ll call you back.”
It took almost forty-eight hours. I was frantic, my emotions swinging like a pendulum between the desire to hide myself or run away altogether and the growing urge to take one of the high-powered lasers I used for rock carving and slice the propulsion team into bite-sized chunks of bloody dead
meat.
I tried to reach Sam a thousand times during those maddening horrible hours of waiting. Always I got one of the crew members from his ship, or a staff person from his headquarters at the Earth View Hotel. Always they gave me the same message: “Sam’s looking into the problem for you. He said he’ll call you as soon as he gets everything straightened out.”
When he finally did call me, I was exhausted and ready for a straitjacket.
“It doesn’t look good,” said his wavering, tight-lipped image. Without waiting for me to respond, Sam outlined the situation.
The Right Reverend Virtue T. Dabney (his T stood for Truthful, it turned out!) had screwed us both. The Moralists never withdrew their claim from the IAA’s arbitration board, and the board had decided in their favor, as Dabney had expected. The Moralists had the right to take my asteroid and use it as construction material.
Worse still, Sam’s cargo of worms had arrived at Eden in fine, slimy, wriggling earthwormy health. And even worse than that, Sam had signed the contract to produce the ionospheric advertisements for the Moralist Sect. The deal was set, as legal and legitimate as an act of the world congress.
“If I don’t go through with the ads,” Sam said, strangely morose, “the bastards can sue me for everything I’ve got. They’ll wind up owning my hotel, my ships, even the clothes on my back.”
“Isn’t there anything we can do?” I pleaded to his image on my screen.
For long minutes he gave no response, as my words struggled across nearly three hundred million kilometers to reach him. I hung weightless before the screen, suspended in the middle of my shabby little compartment while outside I could feel the thumps and clangs of the propulsion team attaching their obscene rocket thrusters and nuclear engines to my asteroid. I felt like a woman surrounded by rapists, helpless and alone.
I stared so hard at Sam’s image in my screen that my eyes began to water. And then I realized that I was crying.
At last, after a lifetime of agony, Sam’s face broke into a sly grin. “Y’know, I saw a cartoon once, when I was a kid. It was in a girlie magazine.”
I wanted to scream at him. What does this have to do with my problem? But he went on calmly, smiling crookedly at his reminiscence, knowing that any objections from me could not reach him for a quarter of an hour.
“It showed these two guys chained to the wall of a dungeon, ten feet off the floor. Chained hand and foot. Beards on them down to their kneecaps. Totally hopeless situation. And one of the guys—” Sam actually laughed! “—one of the guys has this big stupid grin on his face and he’s saying, ‘Now here’s my plan.’“
I felt my lungs filling themselves with air, getting ready to shriek at his nonsense.
“Now, before you blow your top,” Sam warned, “let me tell you two things: First, we’re both in this together. Second—well... here’s my plan.”
He kept on speaking for the next hour and a half. I never got the chance to object or even get a word in.
THAT IS H0W I came to paint the first picture in Earth’s ionosphere.
Sam had expected me all along to draw the advertisements for him. He never planned to use another artist. “Why should some stranger make all that money?” was his attitude.
While the propulsion engineers fitted out my asteroid with their nuclear rocket systems and supply ships from the Moon towed huge spherical tanks of gaseous propellants, Sam relayed the Rev. Dabney’s rough sketches of what the ionospheric advertisements should look like.
They were all photographs of Dabney himself, wrapped in pure white robes with heavenly clouds of gold behind him and just the hint of a halo adorning his saintly head.
I would have trashed them immediately if I had not been aware of Sam’s plan.
The timing had to be perfect. The first ad was scheduled to be placed over the midwestern section of the United States, where it could be seen from roughly Ohio to Iowa. If everything went the way Mountain McGuire and T. Kagashima claimed it would, the picture would drift slowly westward as the day/night terminator crawled across the Earth’s surface.
Sam himself came to visit me on the day that the first ad was to be produced. He was in the latest and largest of his cargo carriers, the Laissez Faire, which he jokingly referred to as “The Lazy Fairy.”
My asteroid was already on its way to Eden. The propulsion engineers had connected the last of their propellant tanks, turned on their systems, and left me alone to glide slowly, under the low but steady thrust of the nuclear rockets, to a rendezvous with Eden. They would return in a few days to make final course corrections and take me off the asteroid forever.
Sam looked absolutely impish when he stepped into my compartment. His grin was almost diabolic. My place was an even bigger mess than usual, what with the sketches for the advertisements floating here and there and all my other sketches and computer wafers hanging weightlessly in midair.
“How can you ever find anything in here?” Sam asked, glancing around.
I had remained at my drawing board, behind it actually. It formed something of a defensive shield for me. I did not want to fling myself into Sam’s arms, no matter how much I really did want to do it. I couldn’t let him think that I was willing to be his lover again in return for the help he was giving me. I couldn’t let myself think that, especially because it was very close to being true.
He gave no indication of expecting such a reward. He merely eyed me mischievously and asked, “You really want to go through with this?”
I did not hesitate an instant. “Yes!”
He took a deep breath. “Okay. I’m game if you are. The lawyers have checked everything out. Let’s do it.”
I slid out from behind my drawing board and went to the computer. Sam came up beside me and activated my communications console. For the next half-hour we were all business, me checking my drawing and Sam connecting with McGuire and Kagashima.
“I’m glad they attached the rockets and that other junk to the end of the asteroid you haven’t carved yet,” Sam muttered as we worked. “Would’ve been a crime if they had messed up the work you’ve already done.”
I nodded curtly, not trusting myself to look into his eyes. He was close enough to brush against my shoulder. I could feel the warmth of his body next to me, even while I sweated with cold apprehension.
Working together as a team linked across hundreds of millions of kilometers, Sam, McGuire, Kagashima and I painted the first picture high in the ionosphere of Earth. From my computer my design went forth to a set of electron guns on board the same orbiting station that housed Sam’s hotel. In the comm screen I saw the picture forming across the flat midsection of North America.
The Virgin of the Andes.
I had no intention of spreading the pompous Dabney’s unctuous features across the sky. Not even the Norte Americanos deserved that. Instead I had drawn a picture from my heart, from my childhood memories of the crude paintings that adorned the whitewashed walls of my village church.
You must understand that it was years before I myself saw my creation in the way it was meant to be seen, from the ground. All I had to go on that day was the little screen of my comm system, and even there I was seeing the Virgin backwards, like looking at a stained glass window from outside the cathedral.
Everyone was caught by surprise. A few startled gringos tried to photograph the picture that suddenly appeared over their heads at sunset, but none of the photos showed the true size or scope or even the actual colors of my Virgin. The colors especially were impossible to capture, they were so pale and shimmering and subtly shifting each moment. By the time television stations realized what was happening and dispatched their mobile news units, the Virgin had disappeared into the darkness of night.
All of North America went into startled, shocked turmoil. Then the word spread all across the world.
Ionosphere paintings last only for those precious few minutes of twilight, of course. Once the Sun dips below the horizon, the delicate electrical effe
cts that create the subtle colors quickly disappear, and the picture fades into nothingness.
Except that the information which created the picture is stored in a computer, gracias a Dios. Many years later, when it was safe for me to return to Earth, I allowed the university to paint my Virgin over the skies of my native land. I saw it at last the way it was meant to be seen. It was beautiful, more beautiful than anything I have ever done since.
But that was not to happen for many years. As Sam and I watched my Virgin fade into darkness he turned to me with a happy grin.
“Now,” he said cheerfully, “the shit hits the fan.”
And indeed it did. Virtually every lawyer in the solar system became involved in the suits, countersuits, and counter-countersuits. Dabney and his Moralists claimed that Sam had violated their contract. Sam claimed that the contract specifically gave him artistic license, and indeed those words were buried in one of the sub-sub-clauses on the next-to-last page of that thick legal document. The advertising industry was thunderstruck. Environmentalists from pole to pole screamed and went to court, which prompted art critics and the entire apparatus of “fine art”—the museums, magazines, charitable associations, social clubs, wealthy patrons and even government agencies—to come to the defense of a lonely young artist that none of them had ever heard of before: Elverda Apacheta. Me!
Sam and I paid scant attention to the legal squabbles. We were sailing on my asteroid past the Moralists’ half-finished Eden and out far beyond Earth’s orbit. Sam’s “Lazy Fairy” was crammed to its sizable capacity with propellants for the nuclear rockets attached to The Rememberer. He jiggered the propulsion engineers’ computer program so that my asteroid headed for deep space, out past even the orbit of Mars, out to the Belt where its brother and sister asteroids orbited by the millions.
When the Moralists’ engineers tried to come out and intercept “their” runaway, Sam gleefully informed them:
“This object is a derelict, under the definition stated in the IAA’s regulations of space commerce. It is heading for deep space, and any attempt to intercept it or change its course will be regarded by the IAA and the world government as an act of piracy!”